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Thread: great paragraphs from what you're reading

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    "Be grateful that you do not have to live down the renown of a father nor the wealth of an uncle.
    But above all be grateful that no one will have to live down either your renown or your wealth." ~ Khalil Gibran

    'One of his most notable lines of poetry is from "Sand and Foam" (1926), which reads: "Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you".'

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    "And lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced. And false be every truth which hath not had laughter along with it!" ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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    Did some HP googling after reading Aramas' post. Found these interesting analyses of character motivation.

  4. #324

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    http://www.manminnews.com/2012/en/co...650&cat=cat_04

    I spent the previous year making the first portfolio. It seemed impossible to make a new one in that short period of time. I was not inspired for design and spent time doing nothing. In early August, Manmin Summer Retreat was drawing nearer. If I went to the retreat, I would have only fifteen days to prepare. My friends said it was ridiculous asking if I would be really okay.

    I thought God would bless me if I went to the retreat on the one hand but I felt nervous on the other hand because I had already failed once. But I took part in the retreat. On the third day, I was praising in Camp Fire Worship & Praise led by Senior Pastor Dr. Jaerock Lee. I suddenly felt convinced that I received the answer. I no longer felt nervous.

    After the retreat, I found artistic inspiration and creative ideas. I felt as if I had a completed work and followed it, and was able to finish the new portfolio within the fifteen days.

    On September 1, I entered the test room with confidence and started pencil drawing but it did not go as I wanted. I went to the church's website on my smartphone and received Senior Pastor's prayer. And I tried it again. I could draw well, and I was satisfied with the drawing and the other applicants even followed my style.

    In the interview, there were the instructors that I had met in the previous interview. I imagined David approaching Goliath, and kept thinking to myself, "I received the shepherd's prayer. Don't be nervous."

  5. #325

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    ''The Buddha, however, denied the existence of the absolute self. He taught that no self-existing, integral, unchanging, and imperishable subject existed.
    All that did exist was a series of selves, born and extinguished from moment to
    moment. This was the revolutionary Buddhist teaching of non-self (anatman),
    which denied the existence of samsara as a substantial entity''
    .
    .
    ''For Derrida, the in-decidability of the meaning in a text, arises out of the
    inexhaustibility of context. This tension is reminiscent of Nagarjuna’s concept of
    the middle path. Like Derrida’s in-decidability, Nagarjuna’s concept of the middle
    path expresses the non-identity of an entity, the impossibility of making a onceand-for-all
    demarcation. The openness by nature readjusts one’s relationship with
    others as well as one’s own identity. Hence, the openness of an entity cannot but
    be related to the political and the ethical.''
    Last edited by Kalinoche buenanoche; 11-01-2018 at 02:55 PM.

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    'If by “Zen” you mean a sort of general detachment from all desires (except perhaps the desire to be detached), many Japanese martial arts are imbued with this spirit. It, and they, have served me very well, especially in combat, as rather than fear death or injury, one is relieved of the burden of caring, freeing the mind and spirit for the focus of the task at hand, which is prevailing, not killing.''

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    Damnit, David


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    Question: I’m concerned about the huge and unprecedented global build-up in debt. How can I hedge against its collapse?
    Answer: If you haven’t already done so, take out a massive, obviously unpayable loan, and then default along with everyone else.
    .

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    In chapter 8 of Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), Professor Challenger says that he dislikes walking along the Thames as it is always sad to see one's final destination. Challenger means that he expects to be buried at Westminster Abbey, but his rival Professor Summerlee responds sardonically that he understands that Millbank Prison has been demolished.
    .

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    “TWO FRONTIERSMEN YARNING!” That was how Jonathan Browning described his meeting with Abraham Lincoln. They shared frontier southern backgrounds, were about the same height, were near the same age, and—according to Browning—shared a penchant for homespun humor. Browning claimed that Lincoln visited his home in Quincy, Illinois , and the two started swapping stories. Lincoln laughed heartily on learning that the gunsmith had once traded a gun for a Bible. It was like “turning swords into plowshares,” Lincoln quipped, in reference to Isaiah’s Biblical admonition. Browning then confessed that the traded gun had been defective, having a mainspring that was “pretty weak.” In mock indignation Lincoln declared, “You cheated in a trade for a Bible!” “Not exactly,” Browning retorted. “When I got looking through that Bible at home, I found about half the New Testament was missing!”
    .

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    Three logicians walk into a bar.
    The barman says, 'Does everybody want a drink?'
    The first logician says, 'I don't know.'
    The second logician says, 'I don't know.'
    The third logician says, 'Yes!.'
    .

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    ‘The Ministry talks of the difficulties of balancing the Budget,’ said Churchill, casting a furtive glance at his family, then at me, ‘of having reached the limit of its appropriations, of having nothing further to tax, when England is stirring its tea like syrup.’ He paused for the effect.
    ‘Is it possible that the Budget could be balanced by an additional tax on tea?’ I asked.
    He looked at me and hesitated. ‘Yes,’ he answered – but not with conviction, I thought.
    ~ Charlie Chaplin

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    Poets themselves, tho’ liars by profession, always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions; and where that is totally neglected, their performances, however ingenious, will never be able to afford much pleasure. In short, we may observe, that even when ideas have no manner of influence on the will and passions, truth and reality are still requisite, in order to make them entertaining to the imagination.

    But if we compare together all the phenomena that occur on this head, we shall find, that truth, however necessary it may seem in all works of genius, has no other effect than to procure an easy reception for the ideas, and to make the mind acquiesce in them with satisfaction, or at least without reluctance. But as this is an effect, which may easily be supposed to flow from that solidity and force, which, according to my system, attend those ideas that are established by reasonings from causation; it follows, that all the influence of belief upon the fancy may be explained from that system. Accordingly we may observe, that wherever that influence arises from any other principles beside truth or reality, they supply its place, and give an equal entertainment to the imagination. Poets have form’d what they call a poetical system of things, which tho’ it be believ’d neither by themselves nor readers, is commonly esteem’d a sufficient foundation for any fiction. We have been so much accustomed to the names of Mars, Jupiter, Venus, that in the same manner as education infixes any opinion, the constant repetition of these ideas makes them enter into the mind with facility, and prevail upon the fancy, without influencing the judgment. In like manner tragedians always borrow their fable, or at least the names of their principal actors, from some known passage in history; and that not in order to deceive the spectators; for they will frankly confess, that truth is not in any circumstance inviolably observed: but in order to procure a more easy reception into the imagination for those extraordinary events, which they represent. But this is a precaution, which is not required of comic poets, whose personages and incidents, being of a more familiar kind, enter easily into the conception, and are received without any such formality, even tho’ at first night they be known to be fictitious, and the pure offspring of the fancy.

    This mixture of truth and falshood in the fables of tragic poets not only serves our present purpose, by shewing, that the imagination can be satisfy’d without any absolute belief or assurance; but may in another view be regarded as a very strong confirmation of this system. ‘Tis evident, that poets make use of this artifice of borrowing the names of their persons, and the chief events of their poems, from history, in order to procure a more easy reception for the whole, and cause it to make a deeper impression on the fancy and affections. The several incidents of the piece acquire a kind of relation by being united into one poem or representation; and if any of these incidents be an object of belief, it bestows a force and vivacity on the others, which are related to it. The vividness of the first conception diffuses itself along the relations, and is convey’d, as by so many pipes or canals, to every idea that has any communication with the primary one. This, indeed, can never amount to a perfect assurance; and that because the union among the ideas is, in a manner, accidental: But still it approaches so near, in its influence, as may convince us, that they are deriv’d from the same origin. Belief must please the imagination by means of the force and vivacity which attends it; since every idea, which has force and vivacity, is found to be agreeable to that faculty.

    To confirm this we may observe, that the assistance is mutual betwixt the judgment and fancy, as well as betwixt the judgment and passion; and that belief not only gives vigour to the imagination, but that a vigorous and strong imagination is of all talents the most proper to procure belief and authority. ‘Tis difficult for us to withhold our assent from what is painted out to us in all the colours of eloquence; and the vivacity produc’d by the fancy is in many cases greater than that which arises from custom and experience. We are hurried away by the lively imagination of our author or companion; and even be himself is often a victim to his own fire and genius.

    Nor will it be amiss to remark, that as a lively imagination very often degenerates into madness or folly, and bears it a great resemblance in its operations; so they influence the judgment after the same manner, and produce belief from the very same principles. When the imagination, from any extraordinary ferment of the blood and spirits, acquires such a vivacity as disorders all its powers and faculties, there is no means of distinguishing betwixt truth and falshood; but every loose fiction or idea, having the same influence as the impressions of the memory, or the conclusions of the judgment, is receiv’d on the same footing, and operates with equal force on the passions. A present impression and a customary transition are now no longer necessary to enliven our ideas. Every chimera of the brain is as vivid and intense as any of those inferences, which we formerly dignify’d with the name of conclusions concerning matters of fact, and sometimes as the present impressions of the senses.

    [The following three paragraphs are inserted from the appendix:]

    We may observe the same effect of poetry in a lesser degree; and this is common both to poetry and madness, that the vivacity they bestow on the ideas is not deriv’d from the particular situations or connexions of the objects of these ideas, but from the present temper and disposition of the person. But how great soever the pitch may be, to which this vivacity rises, ‘tis evident, that in poetry it never has the same feeling with that which arises in the mind, when we reason, tho’ even upon the lowest species of probability. The mind can easily distinguish betwixt the one and the other; and whatever emotion the poetical enthusiasm may give to the spirits, ‘tis still the mere phantom of belief or persuasion. The case is the same with the idea, as with the passion it occasions. There is no passion of the human mind but what may arise from poetry; tho’ at the same time the feelings of the passions are very different when excited by poetical fictions, from what they are when they are from belief and reality. A passion, which is disagreeable in real life, may afford the highest entertainment in a tragedy, or epic poem. In the latter case, it lies not with that weight upon us: It feels less firm and solid: And has no other than the agreeable effect of exciting the spirits, and rouzing the attention. The difference in the passions is a clear proof of a like difference in those ideas, from which the passions are deriv’d. Where the vivacity arises from a customary conjunction with a present impression; tho’ the imagination may not, in appearance, be so much mov’d; yet there is always something more forcible and real in its actions, than in the fervors of poetry and eloquence. The force of our mental actions in this case, no more than in any other, is not to be measur’d by the apparent agitation of the mind. A poetical description may have a more sensible effect on the fancy, than an historical narration. It may collect more of those circumstances, that form a compleat image or picture. It may seem to set the object before us in more lively colours. But still the ideas it presents are different to the feeling from those, which arise from the memory and the judgment. There is something weak and imperfect amidst all that seeming vehemence of thought and sentiment, which attends the fictions of poetry.

    We shall afterwards have occasion to remark both the resemblance and differences betwixt a poetical enthusiasm, and a serious conviction. In the mean time I cannot forbear observing, that the great difference in their feeling proceeds in some measure from reflection and general rules. We observe, that the vigour of conception, which fictions receive from poetry and eloquence, is a circumstance merely accidental, of which every idea is equally susceptible; and that such fictions are connected with nothing that is real. This observation makes us only lend ourselves, so to speak, to the fiction: But causes the idea to feel very different from the eternal establish’d persuasions founded on memory and custom. They are somewhat of the same kind: But the one is much inferior to the other, both in its causes and effects.

    A like reflection on general rules keeps us from augmenting our belief upon every encrease of the force and vivacity of our ideas. Where an opinion admits of no doubt, or opposite probability, we attribute to it a full conviction: tho’ the want of resemblance, or contiguity, may render its force inferior to that of other opinions. ‘Tis thus the understanding corrects the appearances of the senses, and makes us imagine, that an object at twenty foot distance seems even to the eye as large as one of the same dimensions at ten.

    We may observe the same effect of poetry in a lesser degree; only with this difference, that the least reflection dissipates the illusions of poetry, and places the objects in their proper light. ‘Tis however certain, that in the warmth of a poetical enthusiasm, a poet has a, counterfeit belief, and even a kind of vision of his objects: And if there be any shadow of argument to support this belief, nothing contributes more to his full conviction than a blaze of poetical figures and images, which have their effect upon the poet himself, as well as upon his readers.
    from Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume

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    Thus, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts, this young Nobleman had not only had every experience that life has to offer, but had seen the worthlessness of them all. Love and ambition, women and poets were all equally vain. Literature was a farce. The night after reading Greene’s Visit to a Nobleman in the Country, he burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining ‘The Oak Tree’, which was his boyish dream and very short. Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it. So feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and very naked in consequence, he called his hounds to him and strode through the Park.

    So long had he been secluded, writing and reading, that he had half forgotten the amenities of nature, which in June can be great. When he reached that high mound whence on fine days half of England with a slice of Wales and Scotland thrown in can be seen, he flung himself under his favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what years remained to him in tolerable content.

    Here he came then, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. He saw the beech trees turn golden and the young ferns unfurl; he saw the moon sickle and then circular; he saw — but probably the reader can imagine the passage which should follow and how every tree and plant in the neighbourhood is described first green, then golden; how moons rise and suns set; how spring follows winter and autumn summer; how night succeeds day and day night; how there is first a storm and then fine weather; how things remain much as they are for two or three hundred years or so, except for a little dust and a few cobwebs which one old woman can sweep up in half an hour; a conclusion which, one cannot help feeling, might have been reached more quickly by the simple statement that ‘Time passed’ (here the exact amount could be indicated in brackets) and nothing whatever happened.

    But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation. But the biographer, whose interests are, as we have said, highly restricted, must confine himself to one simple statement: when a man has reached the age of thirty, as Orlando now had, time when he is thinking becomes inordinately long; time when he is doing becomes inordinately short. Thus Orlando gave his orders and did the business of his vast estates in a flash; but directly he was alone on the mound under the oak tree, the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest variety of objects. For not only did he find himself confronted by problems which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship? What truth? but directly he came to think about them, his whole past, which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe.

    In such thinking (or by whatever name it should be called) he spent months and years of his life. It would be no exaggeration to say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground. Of the two forces which alternately, and what is more confusing still, at the same moment, dominate our unfortunate numbskulls — brevity and diuturnity — Orlando was sometimes under the influence of the elephant-footed deity, then of the gnat-winged fly. Life seemed to him of prodigious length. Yet even so, it went like a flash. But even when it stretched longest and the moments swelled biggest and he seemed to wander alone in deserts of vast eternity, there was no time for the smoothing out and deciphering of those scored parchments which thirty years among men and women had rolled tight in his heart and brain. Long before he had done thinking about Love (the oak tree had put forth its leaves and shaken them to the ground a dozen times in the process) Ambition would jostle it off the field, to be replaced by Friendship or Literature. And as the first question had not been settled — What is Love? — back it would come at the least provocation or none, and hustle Books or Metaphors of What one lives for into the margin, there to wait till they saw their chance to rush into the field again. What made the process still longer was that it was profusely illustrated, not only with pictures, as that of old Queen Elizabeth, laid on her tapestry couch in rose-coloured brocade with an ivory snuff-box in her hand and a gold-hilted sword by her side, but with scents — she was strongly perfumed — and with sounds; the stags were barking in Richmond Park that winter’s day. And so, the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with old King James’ slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailing ships. Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.

    ‘Another metaphor by Jupiter!’ he would exclaim as he said this (which will show the disorderly and circuitous way in which his mind worked and explain why the oak tree flowered and faded so often before he came to any conclusion about Love). ‘And what’s the point of it?’ he would ask himself. ‘Why not say simply in so many words —’ and then he would try to think for half an hour — or was it two years and a half? — how to say simply in so many words what love is. ‘A figure like that is manifestly untruthful,’ he argued, ‘for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea. And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all,’ he cried, ‘why say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?’

    So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. ‘The sky is blue,’ he said, ‘the grass is green.’ Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. ‘Upon my word,’ he said (for he had fallen into the bad habit of speaking aloud), ‘I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.’ And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.
    Orlando by Virignia Woolf

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    Quote Originally Posted by The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch
    "One currently influential philosophical movement goes under various names such as postmodernism, deconstructionism and structuralism, depending on historical details that are unimportant here. It claims that because all ideas, including scientific theories, are conjectural and impossible to justify, they are essentially arbitrary: they are no more than stories, known in this context as ‘narratives’. Mixing extreme cultural relativism with other forms of anti-realism, it regards objective truth and falsity, as well as reality and knowledge of reality, as mere conventional forms of words that stand for an idea’s being endorsed by a designated group of people such as an elite or consensus, or by a fashion or other arbitrary authority. And it regards science and the Enlightenment as no more than one such fashion, and the objective knowledge claimed by science as an arrogant cultural conceit.

    Perhaps inevitably, these charges are true of postmodernism itself: it is a narrative that resists rational criticism or improvement, precisely because it rejects all criticism as mere narrative. Creating a successful postmodernist theory is indeed purely a matter of meeting the criteria of the postmodernist community – which have evolved to be complex, exclusive and authority-based. Nothing like that is true of rational ways of thinking: creating a good explanation is hard not because of what anyone has decided, but because there is an objective reality that does not meet anyone’s prior expectations, including those of authorities. The creators of bad explanations such as myths are indeed just making things up. But the method of seeking good explanations creates an engagement with reality, not only in science, but in good philosophy too – which is why it works, and why it is the antithesis of concocting stories to meet made-up criteria."
    - The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch

    Neither Socionics, nor the Socionics community, goes for what is "objectively true" by the route of rational inquiry, but rather these things are merely decided collectively by the community, or some authority figure, such as a prominent Socionist or a prominent community member.

    Anything that is decided to be "correct" or "incorrect" within Socionics is merely a matter of narrative, and hence decides itself to be nothing more than a narrative of say, "Ti types".

    Any criticism of Socionics is rejected as a mere narrative, such as that it is merely the predictable criticism of "the Critic ILI", or some disgruntled "anti-Socionist", or a "pro-science Positivist", or whatever.

    Socionics can't be objective because it has no objective criteria or a genuine rational inquiry of why it should be correct or incorrect, valid or invalid, subjective or objective, rational or irrational (they are decided arbitrarily by either a few or the community). At best, it's some collectively agreed upon view of some group of people, a narrative of a few, which is what itself claim itself to be.

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    Who could desire freewill? Who would not say, with Huxley, "let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go iight fatally, and I ask no better freedom. "Freedom' in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to be worse, and who could be so insane as to wish that?

    -William James, Pragmatism
    "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

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    “In one memorable episode, Warren received a trusting note from a woman in the bookkeeping department via the library’s pneumatic-tube system, which ran between the library and store. “It’s very slow here on this rainy day,” the bookkeeper complained. “Please send me one of those novels you have had to withdraw from circulation as unfit for a lady to read.” Warren fulfilled the request and was surprised the next day to receive the book back, discreetly wrapped, with the message: “Blessings upon you! You’re quite right. This is not fit for anybody to read. Please send another just like it.”

    ― Molly Guptill Manning, When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tearsofaclown View Post
    Who could desire freewill? Who would not say, with Huxley, "let me be wound up every day like a watch, to go iight fatally, and I ask no better freedom. "Freedom' in a world already perfect could only mean freedom to be worse, and who could be so insane as to wish that?

    -William James, Pragmatism
    Problem: we don't actually live in a perfect world, we live in an imperfect world. So it could only get better from there, if we desired.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Singu View Post
    Problem: we don't actually live in a perfect world, we live in an imperfect world. So it could only get better from there, if we desired.
    I agree. He was arguing against people like Leibniz who said that we live in the best possible world. He called Leibniz "superficiality incarnate". lol. The harshest comment I have ever seen James make.
    "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

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    "The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end"

    Circles are then described as the nature of humanity. We are the core of our own circles. I am the centre of my circle, you are the centre of your circle. We each make efforts to grow our circles throughout life. We do this by learning emotionally, spiritually, through education and wisdom, and through thinking. We draw bigger and bigger circles around our old circles. As we draw bigger circles, we expand our consciousness, our horizons, and develop our minds. Knowledge fills circles, and makes them more stable, wisdom and experience are what draw bigger circles. Stronger, more powerful souls expand their circles more rapidly as our volition gives direction to our growth.

    "
    . The life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. The extent to which this generation of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the force or truth of the individual soul. "

    You can see how he influenced Nietzsche.
    "And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them."

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    In many contexts, queers have been convenient sacrificial surrogates[48] for larger cultural anxieties about sex, power, and difference. We argue that this is precisely because gay men rooting around in one another’s cavities, “eating da poo poo,” pose an inverted image of the infant or toddler whose relationship to shit is innocent, cute, natural, an image endangered or polluted by sex. Heteronormative culture wars and collective sexual identities thereby gravitate around queer poop as powerful matter that worlds differences into being, illustrating in part what Paxson calls a “microbiopolitics” of life.[49] Digestive tracts and poop operate as more than signs, as visceral reminders of cross-species interdependencies and what bodies are capable of.

    Through the very efforts to police pooping bodies, poop enters ever more public modes of circulation. While counterarguments, such as those of the Southern Poverty Law Center that debunk the Moral Right, offer necessary correctives to the homophobias promulgated in the name of church and family, they also sometimes occlude the very messy materialities that stick to sex. In so doing they might manage to make gay sex seem a little cleaner than it actually is. Both the right and their critics are, to draw on Mary Douglas’s classic formulation, looking to create more order by getting rid of the dirt. The Christian Right claims that gay sex is inherently dirty and that gays are prone to disease. This explains the ongoing emphasis among the Moral Right on the need for conversion therapies “to cease homosexual practices to avoid the unacceptable health risks associated with that behavior,” as put by George Rekers, an FRC founding board member and one of many homophobic conservatives to be caught up in a gay sex scandal.[50] Gays, they say, have shorter lives, suffer from more STIs, struggle with mental illness, and “eat da poo poo.”
    p . . . a . . . n . . . d . . . o . . . r . . . a
    trad metalz | (more coming)

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    "Today as never before it is important that human beings
    should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them.
    It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must
    insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that
    regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent."

    C.G. Jung, Collected Works

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    "In our acquisition of knowledge of the Universe (whether mathematical or otherwise) that which renovates the quest is nothing more nor less than complete innocence. It is in this state of complete innocence that we receive everything from the moment of our birth. Although so often the object of our contempt and of our private fears, it is always in us. It alone can unite humility with boldness so as to allow us to penetrate to the heart of things, or allow things to enter us and taken possession of us.

    This unique power is in no way a privilege given to "exceptional talents" - persons of incredible brain power (for example), who are better able to manipulate, with dexterity and ease, an enormous mass of data, ideas and specialized skills. Such gifts are undeniably valuable, and certainly worthy of envy from those who (like myself) were not so "endowed at birth, far beyond the ordinary".

    Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the "invisible yet formidable boundaries" that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn't even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child's play."

    Alexander Grothendieck

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    In The Sickness Unto Death (1849), Kierkegaard, writing under the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus, urges the view that the sickness unto death is despair. And what is despair? In Part One, Kierkegaard defines despair in secular terms; for example as a spiritual imbalance and/or a lack of consciousness of being a self. In Part Two, however, he comes straight out and announces that despair is sin. And what is sin?

    Kierkegaard commences with the Socratic notion that sin is ignorance. Yet, going from Socrates to Aristotle, we see that sin would not be sin if we sinned out of an ignorance of which we were not culpable, since sin implies some sort of guilt.

    But suppose that our ignorance is self-induced? At this point, Kierkegaard launches into one the clearest explanations of self-deception to be found in the Western tradition:

    “if a person does not do what is right at the very second he knows it – then knowing simmers down. Next comes the question of how willing appraises what is known. Willing is dialectical and has under it the entire lower nature of man. If willing does not agree with what is known, then it does not necessarily follow that willing goes ahead and does the opposite of what willing understood… rather willing allows some time to elapse, an interim called: ‘We shall look at it tomorrow’. During all this, knowing becomes more and more obscure, and the lower nature gains the upper hand more and more; alas, for the good must be done immediately, as soon as it is known… the lower nature’s power lies in stretching things out… And when knowing has become duly obscured, knowing and willing can better understand each other; eventually they agree completely, for now knowing has come over to the side of willing and admits that what [willing] wants is absolutely right.”


    Kierkegaard is convinced that at some level we understand that doing the right thing will frequently bring us into collision with what we perceive to be our short and even long term self-interests. Consider, for example, a police officer who witnesses her partner of ten years abusing a suspect. Turn your partner in, and the thin blue line will more than likely turn its back on you. Outraged as she is, perhaps the officer thinks, “I have a family to feed and maybe I’d better sleep on the decision.” Sleep indeed she does. By the next day, she leads herself to believe that her partner’s over-reaction was just an aberration.

    Kierkegaard warns then that putting moral decisions off is a common way of talking ourselves out of them. So for Kierkegaard, the relatively innocent-appearing sin of procrastination, something we associate with writing papers or filing taxes, and shrug off, is a door to perdition. However, he offers a prescription for neutralizing it.

    https://philosophynow.org/issues/130...rocrastination

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    "Two paths lie before me now, they say, together with the one I have
    travelled upon to reach this place, the path straight ahead which is
    short and ends soon. They resemble the rune elhaz. I stand at the point
    of division. Do not choose too soon: do not choose until the last
    moment. One path is easier, one carries more of sacrifice. Yet the
    paths bend around, so that both lead in the end to the same place: I
    know where I will go in the end, I know where my home is. The
    guardian stands by the way ...

    I stand in two worlds balancing their demands. Do I understand? I
    must not choose too soon ... I stand balanced on a knife edge, I walk a
    knife edge ...

    ‘Do you understand this?’says Skuld."

    “My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.”​ —C.G. Jung
     
    YWIMW

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    Quote Originally Posted by Aylen View Post
    "Two paths lie before me now, they say, together with the one I have
    travelled upon to reach this place, the path straight ahead which is
    short and ends soon. They resemble the rune elhaz. I stand at the point
    of division. Do not choose too soon: do not choose until the last
    moment. One path is easier, one carries more of sacrifice. Yet the
    paths bend around, so that both lead in the end to the same place: I
    know where I will go in the end, I know where my home is. The
    guardian stands by the way ...

    I stand in two worlds balancing their demands. Do I understand? I
    must not choose too soon ... I stand balanced on a knife edge, I walk a
    knife edge ...

    ‘Do you understand this?’says Skuld."
    I love the movie Blade Runner. It is based on the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Blade runner was the name of a book where medicine was outlawed or heavily regulated and people would literally be blade runners. They would smuggle surgical tools like blades. They named the movie that basically because it sounds cool but it fits. They only live 3 years. We are walking on a knife. They are running on one.

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    In another book I quoted a case of my own which aptly illustrates the difficulty of evaluating the results of any form of psychotherapy. I received a letter from a man whom I had treated rather briefly in a National Health Service setting 25 years previously. He wanted me to see his daughter. In his letter he wrote: ‘I can quite truthfully say that six months of your patient listening to my woes made a most important contribution to my life style. Although my transvestism was not cured my approach to life and to other people was re-orientated and for that I am most grateful. It is part of my life that I have never forgotten.’
    .

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    There was little in the early life of Robert Leopold Spitzer to suggest he would one day be a psychiatric revolutionary, but it wasn’t hard to find indications of a methodical approach to human behavior. “When I was twelve years old I went to summer camp for two months, and I developed considerable interest in some of the female campers,” Spitzer tells me. “So I made a graph on the wall of my feelings towards five or six girls. I charted my feelings as they went up and down over the course of summer camp. I also recall being bothered by the fact that I was attracted to girls that I didn’t really like very much, so maybe my graph helped me make sense of my feelings.”
    .

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    Consider an experiment in which psychologists dropped 240 wallets on various Edinburgh streets. In each wallet, there was a personal photo, some ID, an old raffle ticket, a membership card or two, and a few other minor personal items. There was no cash. The only variation in the wallets was the photograph, which could be seen through a clear plastic window. In some, it showed a smiling baby. In others, there was a puppy, a family, or an elderly couple. A few of the wallets had no photo at all. The researchers wanted to know how many of the wallets would be dropped in mailboxes, taken to the police, or otherwise returned. More specifically, the researchers wanted to know if the content of the photograph in each wallet would make a difference. It shouldn’t, of course. A lost wallet is important to whoever loses it and returning it is a bother no matter what’s in it. In strictly rational terms, the nature of the photograph is irrelevant.

    And yet psychologist Richard Wiseman discovered that the photograph made an enormous difference. Only 15 percent of those without one were returned. A little more than one-quarter of the wallets with a picture of an elderly couple were returned, while 48 percent of the wallets with a picture of a family, and 53 percent with the photo of a puppy, were returned. But the baby walloped them all; an amazing 88 percent of wallets with pictures of infants were returned.
    .

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    Most children would be embarrassed to learn that their mother, a person who has known them intimately their whole life, would think it more plausible that they had been killed than that they had been out on a date.
    .

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    Their frustration is illustrated by a possibly apocryphal story of the early computer that was given the task of translating the homily “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into Russian and then back into English. According to the story, it came out: “The vodka is strong but the meat is rotten.”
    .

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    French culture is known for many great attributes, some of which probably have nothing to do with food, wine, and romance. But regarding the latter, the French are thought to especially excel, and in the experiment in question, they literally made a science of it. The scene was a particularly sunny June day in a pedestrian zone in the city of Vannes, a medium-sized town on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, in the west of France. Over the course of that day, three young and handsome French men randomly approached 240 young women they spotted walking alone and propositioned each and every one of them. To each, they would utter exactly the same words: “Hello. My name’s Antoine. I just want to say that I think you’re really pretty. I have to go to work this afternoon but I wonder if you would give me your phone number. I’ll phone you later and we can have a drink together someplace.” If the woman refused, they’d say, “Too bad. It’s not my day. Have a nice afternoon.” And then they’d look for another young woman to approach. If the woman handed over her number, they’d tell her the proposition was all in the name of science, at which time, according to the scientists, most of the women laughed. The key to the experiment was this: with half the women they propositioned, the young men added a light one-second touch to the woman’s forearm. The other half received no touch.

    The researchers were interested in whether the men would be more successful when they touched the women than when they didn’t. How important is touch as a social cue? Over the course of the day, the young men collected three dozen phone numbers. When they didn’t touch the women, they had a success rate of 10 percent; when they touched them, their success rate was 20 percent. That light one-second touch doubled their popularity. Why were the touched women twice as likely to agree to a date? Were they thinking, This Antoine is a good toucher—it’d probably be fun to knock down a bottle of Bordeaux with him some night at Bar de l’Océan? Probably not. But on the unconscious level, touch seems to impart a subliminal sense of caring and connection.
    .

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    Few figures epitomize the lone artist more than Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. He lived in the shadows of the artistic establishment and sold few paintings in his lifetime. But a close look at his life tells a story of someone engaged with his peers. He corresponded with many young artists in letters filled with shoptalk and unvarnished critiques of other painters. When he received his first good review, he sent a cypress tree to the critic as a present. He and Paul Gauguin made plans at one point to build an artist colony in the tropics. So why do people still say that Van Gogh was a splendid isolationist? Because it feeds into a satisfying story about the fountainhead of his genius. But the story is a myth. Neither a misfit nor a loner, he was an active participant in his time.
    ~ The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World by David Eagleman

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    ''(...)hence, let it be forgotten, and shout in chorus with the multitude, laugh or weep, be busy from morning to night; be loved and respected and esteemed as friend, as officer, as king, as pallbearer; above all, be a serious man through having forgotten the only serious matter, that of maintaining your relation to God by becoming nothing. Oh, but consider then - still it does no good to talk, but God grant that you may understand what you lost, so that this annihilation before God may be blessed in such a way that you again retrace your way back to this annihilation every moment more strongly, more fervently, more inwardly than the blood returns to the place from which it was forced out.''

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    Samsara! Samarra!
    Grand!
    I can walk away
    from anything.
    Everyone loves
    the Dream but I kill it.
    Atlas Mountain Cedars gush
    over me: —Up Boogaloo!
    I leap free this spring.
    On fire. How my hair curls.
    I'll destroy the World.

    Mark Z. Danielewski, Only Revolutions

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    “There’s a Korean word my grandma taught me. It’s called jung. It’s the connection between two people that can’t be severed, even when love turns to hate. You still have those old feelings for them; you can’t ever completely shake them loose of you; you will always have tenderness in your heart for them.”
    ― Jenny Han, P.S. I Still Love You

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    "According to the Mazarinades, the cardinal's involvement in government ensured that everything in France ended up (in the words of one of them) ‘like either a brothel or a cemetery’."

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    "Musil collapsed in the middle of his gymnastic exercises and is rumoured to have died with an expression of ironic amusement on his face."


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    From Noir, by Christopher Moore:

    I took a deep breath and held it while I dug into Sal’s pocket for his keys, found them, then stepped politely over him and out the back door, scooting his leg away a little as I went, so it would be easier to get back in. Once outside in the alley, I locked the door, and sighed as if I’d stepped safely off a minefield. But when I turned around there were two tall, thin guys in black suits, hats, and sunglasses, standing behind me – and I mean right there. It’s like they’d been waiting for me. They were trying to act unflappable, but they were flapped more than somewhat by my second manly scream of the day.

    There are times in a guy’s life when he finds himself floating facedown in a sea of troubles, and as hope bubbles away, he thinks, How the hell did I get here?

    I mean, I didn’t know then what the two mugs in black suits knew, which was that across the vastness of space, we were being studied by intellects far superior to man’s, by beings that regarded us with envious eyes and, slowly and surely, were drawing their plans to come to our world and motorboat the bazooms of our dames.

    Yeah, a dame, that’s how it starts…

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